NEXT.io, BettingStartups talk startups and funding: “At the early stage, you're really betting on the jockey, not the horse.”

After launching its capital arm earlier this month, BettingStartups founder Jesse Learmonth is now on the other side of the table—evaluating early-stage startups not just as a media operator, but as an investor.

That shift, and how he thinks about backing companies before traditional metrics exist, was the focus of a recent appearance on the NEXT.io Podcast.

At the earliest stages, Learmonth is blunt about the reality: there simply isn’t enough data to evaluate businesses the way later-stage investors might. “Early stage ideas, by definition, don't have fundamental business KPIs and unit economics… there's no fundamentals to assess,” he said.

Instead, the evaluation framework collapses down to something more subjective—and arguably more difficult to get right. “At the early stage, you're really betting on the jockey, not the horse.”

That philosophy sits at the core of BettingStartups Capital, which launched earlier this month to write $100,000 to $250,000 checks into pre-seed and seed-stage companies across the real-money gaming ecosystem—first among them was AI supplier InsightPlay.ai. The firm is founder-funded and positions itself as a blend of capital, media distribution, and operator insight—an extension of the platform BettingStartups has built over the past four years.

For Learmonth, that proximity to founders is part of the edge. Years of hosting conversations with early-stage operators has created a pipeline, and a pattern recognition advantage, that now feeds directly into deal flow. As he put it, the goal is to “have an opportunity to get… early access to what are hopefully some amazing deals that end up becoming massively successful companies.”

But once those opportunities come in, the decision-making process becomes less about spreadsheets and more about people.

Learmonth points to a specific set of founder traits that consistently stand out—anchored in a balance that’s easy to describe but difficult to execute. “There’s this fine balance that founders have to strike between having conviction in their idea, but also having the humility to listen to the market… and adapt along the way,” he said.

That balance ultimately ladders up to a simple framework the firm uses internally. “She's looking for four things… hungry, humble, smart, and passionate,” Learmonth said, referencing co-lead Paris Smith’s approach.

Those qualities are inherently hard to measure, which is why Learmonth says instinct still plays a role. In a market where many startups are pre-revenue or just shipping MVPs, BettingStartups Capital leans heavily on gut feel, pattern recognition, and founder interactions to make decisions.

There are still baseline expectations. Founders should have something in market, even if it’s early, and some signal of demand. But the bar for polish is lower than the bar for mindset.

That reflects a broader reality in early-stage betting startups, where regulatory complexity, distribution challenges, and evolving product formats make traditional venture frameworks harder to apply. In that environment, backing the right person, rather than the perfect model, can be the difference.

For BettingStartups, it’s also a natural extension of what the platform has already been doing: identifying ambitious founders early, giving them visibility, and now, selectively backing them with capital.